After chuckling a wee bit about this particular story, I realized that it does actually touch on a serious archaeological issue - the proper treatment of human remains. Archaeologists have to be aware of local sentiment concerning such finds, and must be willing to accomodate such sentiment. I remember a dig I was on where we found a large pre-Roman chamber tomb, with bodies, and quickly handed the excavation of it over to local archaeologists. It was no big deal, actually, but in some areas, particularly in the new world, archaeologists have not shown proper respect to indigenous human remains, and have alienated the local populations as a result. Anyway, I don't know whether the archaeologists from Novosibirsk were guilty of that in the story above, but they do now have an issue on their hands, and it's one they'll have to deal with if they wish to keep digging in the Altai mountains.__________________________________Ok, so I wrote that about two years ago, but I think the principle still stands. I would add only that although it is rather unlikely that the Altai Princess is actually causing earthquakes and bad weather, as far as the archaeologists are concerned, she might as well be. I was also going to sling a picture of the Altay Princess up here just to illustrate who we're talking about, but it is, interestingly, damn near impossible to find one.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Another Archaeology Blog

So over the past couple of weeks, a certain amount of our traffic has come from people who have been googling "Tudor-Whelan" and found a link to our, um, uncomplimentary remarks of February 10th (as a matter of fact, for a few glorious days, we were the first link one received when googling "Tudor-Whelan"). However, we are not the only people to have expressed annoyance with Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings; in fact, we're not even the only Canadians. And this has been a very long-winded and incoherent way of saying that we're adding Mirabilis.ca to the list of blogs we like.

And, um, speaking of Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings, it appears that they may be climbing down on the issue of selling the tombstone abroad.

For those of you who don't remember, Kyle Young was the small teenaged boy who, while shackled, handcuffed, and under the control of two trained, adult, jail guards, managed to make his way through a closed elevator door, and down the shaft, with predictably fatal consequences. Somehow, nobody except Kyle Young was ever found to be at fault for this, although the incident did produce one of the most loathsome letters to the editor that I have ever seen. Goddammit, but there are some real fucktards out there.

Anyway, his mother is now attempting to get at least a little bit of something, some acknowledgement that there was wrongdoing, some sort of symbolic victory over a process that has done nothing but treat her with apparently deliberate contempt throughout. We wish her nothing but the best in this, and we'll keep you posted.

Yup, it's that time again! Now, this past week was a big one archaeologically, what with this, and, somewhat less reported but just as important, this. However, my interest was caught specifically by this unrelated item:

The Battle of Teutoburger Wald was one of the great Roman disasters. The Cherusci, one of those ferocious Germanic tribes that were such a bugbear to the Romans, pulled a neat bit of deception and caught an entire Roman army, under the leadership of Publius Quinctilius Varus, completely unawares somewhere around here:

As the above article notes, the result was the deaths of thousands of Roman soldiers, and the humiliating loss of the legionary standards, which were recaptured under later Emperors. The disaster actually, according to some sources, drove the Emperor Augustus mildly insane; he is reported to have spent a good chunk of time after the battle wandering the halls of his palace shouting "Quinctilius Varus, bring back my legions!" In the 19th century, the event became a symbol of German nationalism, and a monument was raised to Arminius, the Cheruscan chieftain who masterminded the victory.

Anyway, it seems that people are now getting down to the serious work of proper archaeological research on the battle. Battlefield archaeology has always been a bit of a tricky business, particularly when dealing with ancient battles; only rarely can the actual events of a battle be recreated (as mentioned in the above article, the victors did tend to clean the place up after the fighting was done). Furthermore, the precise locations of many ancient battles are not known. Some of my own fieldwork (unrelated to the battle) has been done very close to the site of a Hannibalic victory over Rome in 218 B.C. Although the local placenames are full of military imagery (e.g. Ossaia="The Bone Place", Sanguineto="Bloody", Sepoltaglia="Place of Tombs"), nobody actually knows exactly where the fighting took place. Another example is the famous Battle of Mons Graupius, between the Romans and the Caledonii. This location of this fight has been narrowed down to "somewhere in northern Scotland," but beyond that, so little of it is known that some people have questioned whether it happened at all. For this reason, it's always rather fun to see one of the famous battlefields properly identified, and professionally excavated.

Possibly the best thing ever to happen to women's ice hockey, and I honestly don't mean that with any snark towards the U.S. team. I actually feel somewhat gutted for them. However, with the Finns looking competitive, and the Swedes pulling off this monumentally unlikely victory, it appears the sport may be developing nicely at the international level. A lot of Canadians are celebrating as though this result automatically hands them the gold, but don't bet on it just yet...

I remember this, actually. My main watering-hole on campus was the late lamented Dewey's Pub & Deli, where unfortunately the regular clientele included Ezra Levant, who at the time was considered something of a golden boy in Alberta conservatism, and was clearly lining himself up for a big-time political career. Of course, he fucked that up in a number of interesting different ways, and on a number of different occasions. Anyhoo, when the Gateway published that cartoon, well, lets just say that the political arguments in Dewey's got ramped up a notch or two. And yeah, ol' Ezra was pretty much leading the "lynch the cartoonist" brigade that time around.

Monday, February 13, 2006

And In Other News...

Conservative Life, whose death we somberly announced some time ago, seems to have shambled back from beyond the grave. And they're all over this story, from some batshit insane woman down south. Here's an excerpt:

I'm actually sort of interested to see what comes of this, although I'm not a real fan of the superhero genre of comic books. And, speaking of things "comic," I invite you to check out the Comments section for this story. It seems some folks are pretty excited, although because Miller once portrayed Ronald Reagan as less than truly divine, he's still suspect.

And with that, the Conservative Government essentially said "Fuck You" to Canadians in general. It followed that with: "You kept us out of power for more than a decade, and by fuck you are going to pay for it. You were dumb enough to fall for the 'more moderate' bullshit that pulled during the campaign, and you let us in the door, and now we are going to do to you whatever the fuck we want. Ethical government? Fuck that."

To their credit though, conservatives (and some Conservatives) around the country are plenty pissed with the new government's blatant lack of common decency. We're all well aware of Garth Turner's views on the matter, but even the folks over at the hilariously named "Proud To Be Canadian" blog weighed in, issuing a persipacious and wise statement on the issue:

Sounds to me like Christopher Tudor-Whelan, director of Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings which specialises in commercial investment properties, is deserving of a swift kick in the fork. But that's just me (and, for the sake of fairness, it's worth pointing out that there are artefacts in the British Museum whose provenance is, shall we say, somewhat odd).

Oh, Lucius Nisus Vodvilleius (or perhaps Insus, son of Vodullus), what sins did you commit in life, that your tombstone ended up on land belonging to Christopher Tudor-Whelan, director of Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings, which specialises in commercial investment properties?

Anyway, enough snark. I selected this particular article for this week's FAB mostly because my very favourite archaeological find in the entire world ever is a Roman tombstone from Britain, dating probably to the 3rd century A.D. And, here it is:

"To the spirits of the departed and Regina, freedwoman and wife of Barates of Palmyra, a Catuvellaunian by race, thirty years old."

Alright, so we have this Barates, from Palmyra in the Middle East. As a young man, 17 or 18 years old, he enlists in the Roman army, and gets posted to Britannia, which is as far away from, and unlike, Syria as it is possible to get in the Roman Empire. Britain in the 3rd century was not as awful as it had been, say, 200 years earlier, but it was still cold, wet, and dangerous (In fact, the emperor Septimus Severus died in Britain while conducting military operations in A.D. 211). We can only imagine what it must have been like for a Syrian teenager.

However, our man Barates did alright. At some point, at one of the slave auctions, he encountered Regina, a Celtic woman from the tribe that had been in the vanguard of the opposition to Rome so many years before. Apparently a man of taste and discernment, Barates bought Regina. And then he did an unlikely thing; he not only freed her, but married her as well. This he did not have to do; had he merely wanted somebody to boink, he could have kept her as a slave. In fact, his act of marrying her was probably illegal, given that he was likely a soldier. Evidently, he fell in love with her, enough so that when she died, he paid for an ornate tombstone, and added a poignant little lament in his native language (Aremaic) beneath the traditional Latin inscription.

Barates never went back to Syria. He died in the North of what is now England at the age of 63, according to his tombstone, which was found some distance, but not too far, from that of his young wife.

Anyway, I've obviously taken a few liberties with the evidence here in constructing the tale of Barates and Regina, but the core facts of the story (including Barates' affection for Regina) are likely enough. Which is why, when I read shit like this:

For anybody interested in looking at the tombstones of Regina and Barates in more detail, they are published in Collingwood & Wright, The Roman Inscriptions of Britain: Volume I (Oxford U. Press, 1965), and are reference numbers 1065 and 1171 respectively.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Friday, February 03, 2006

Best Wishes, Cathie

One of our favouritest people in Bloggonia, Cathie from Canada, has managed to get herself (fortunately mildly) injured in a car accident. Oi! Thump! extends its sincerest best wishes for a speedy recovery, and we encourage everyone to stop over at her blog and wish her the best.

Ok, so what can this tell us? Well, first of all, wine and oil amphorae were often stamped with a "maker's mark":

While these don't necessarily give one the origin of a specific cargo, they do tell us where the amphora was made, and this knowledge can obviously help in putting together a larger picture of trade in a certain region. For example, if you're finding Spanish amphorae all over the place in, say, the region of Cyprus, you can pretty much safely say that there was some sort of exchange going on between those two regions, whether or not the vessels were later being re-used for more local commerce. Furthermore, there's a chance, albeit a slim one, that some of the amphora contents may have survived, and chemical analysis can help pinpoint the exact origin of the material. As far as the ship itself is concerned, I couldn't tell from any of the pictures how intact it was, but archaeologists may be able to work out its dimensions, and at least some of the details of its appearance. It probably looked not unlike this:

In short, this wreck has the potential to yield some interesting new data on what exactly was going on in the Aegean area about the time that Philip of Macedon...

...was moving onto the scene, and the last vestiges of what had been the "Golden Age" of Greece were fading away.